What did Lily Gladstone say about her sexual orientation? Maureen Callahan criticizes actress's identity, claiming it has to be "one or the other"

American columnist Maureen Callahan recently criticized actress Lily Gladstone's statements about her sexual orientation. In an interview with The Times, published on April 25, 2025, Gladstone revealed that she identifies as demisexual.

On May 3, 2025, Callahan uploaded a video on her podcast, The Nerve with Maureen Callahan, commenting on "the trend of LGBT kids in Hollywood". The columnist criticized Gladstone's statements about their confusion with their sexual orientation, saying:

"She thought she might have been asexual because she has no attraction to anybody, and then she had a romantic attraction to everybody, but no, like, okay, it's one or the other, lady. Okay, you either have no sexual attraction to anybody or you are sexually attracted to everybody, but it cannot be both. Like, logically, it just can't."

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Lily Gladstone's statements explored

In a December 2023 interview with People, Lily Gladstone stated that she uses she/they pronouns in an effort to "decolonizing gender". The Killers of the Flower Moon star commented on how most Native American languages were not gendered. She told the outlet:

“And in most Native languages, most Indigenous languages, Blackfeet included, there are no gendered pronouns. There is no he/she, there's only they...So, yeah, my pronoun use is partly a way of decolonizing gender for myself.”

According to them, some netizens interpreted this as Gladstone declaring that they were Two Spirit. For the unversed, Two Spirit is an umbrella term that explicitly refers to Indigenous gender variant people who play particular roles in their societies across Turtle Island (North America) and Abya Yala (South America).

Gladstone clarified her comments in a 2024 tweet, stating that she was not Two Spirit, but uses nonbinary pronouns.

During her April 2025 interview with The Times, Lily Gladstone referred to herself as "queer", "pansexual", and "straight", commenting that they found it difficult to assign one particular label to their sexuality. She shared her realization of being demisexual, stating:

"There was a period of my life when I thought I might be asexual because I had no sexual attraction to anybody. I had a romantic attraction to everybody, but no sexual desire. Then the word ‘demisexual’ came into play, where it’s, like, I don’t feel sexual stirring at all unless I actually care about this person, no matter who they are.”

Lily Gladstone at the 81st Golden Globe Awards (Image via Getty)

Gladstone also remarked on an important aspect that led her to recognize her "queerness". She said,

“One of the big things that tipped me to my queerness is I don’t have the draw to motherhood the way a lot of women have."

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Lily Gladstone is yet to publicly respond to Maureen Callahan's statements.